;.clst draft, excerpt edits Shlomo, Monterrey 1978
;.l1,6,60,66,1,0,12,72,192,2,17,42,127,12,0,
R. SHLOMO CARLEBACH
remarks, exerpted & edited by Steve Amdur (12/15/88)
    DISC:  =IBM-PC/E.W. 7.5, Disc=SA1 (Alifa, Modiin), Doc=s1
Source:  1978 California "Interview, R. Shlomo Carlebach"
(Interview with Dick Cooper for "Whatever's Right"
     xerox of typed transcript, from Joshua Witt
                                        
direct quotes in quotation marks     "_____________"
unquoted material is paraphrase
internal paraphrases in brackets      [_____________]
editorial omission by ellipsis:       ....    
page references to xerox of transcript
                                                  

"I'll put it like a vitamin pill before you; if we make it onthe level of food, we'll have to eat for three hours." (p10)
               
1.  ON JOY:
"The first sign of a free person is joy." (p1)
"In heaven they don't know anything about sadness, they onlyknow joy."
"Every human being has a safe in Heaven somewhere, witheverything they need." (p2)
"So the more you're connected to Heaven" (p1)[the more joyyou have.]
[As if you had to panhandle on a streetcorner for a quarter,but you were Baron Rothschild and so you knew you hadinfinite riches stored in a safe place.]

2. ON DRUGS:
[In 1966, on the West Coast, I realized that it was not drugswhich were "so magnetic to young people"; they were lookingfor "something deep and something holy, and sadly enough thesynagogues" didn't  "have it." (p2).]

3.  THE MEANING OF ME'OR MODI'IN:
"We are building a little village in Israel which is calledMe'or Modi'in -- [which means] 'the light of letting thepeople know'...I live in Toronto a little bit, but myheart"[lives at Me'or Modi'in] "all the time." (p2) "We hoplethat this little village will become one of the greatspiritual centers of the world."

4.  THE MELODIES OF PROPHECIES
"Most of my songs are melodies for prophecies, becauseaccording to our tradition [each prophet has a "school" andhis prophecies were sung to instrumental accompaniement by  
that school.] "At the very moment when we'll know the melodyof the prophecy, then it will come true." (p4)
.p
5.  ON PARADISE:
"On Shabbos...you have to be in a different place than duringthe week; you have to be higher.  So everybody knows that G-dcreated Adam and Eve on Friday, the sicth day of creation. And accoridng to our tradition, on that very day they ate theforbidden fruit, and just one second before sunset they weredreiven out from Paradise.  But then on Shabbos...G-d tookthem back to Paradise.  So even if the whole world is drivenout from Paradise during the six days of the week, on Shabbosthe whole world has a chance to go back to Paradise."
     But imagine:  if Adam had not been driven out fromParadise, where could he go for Shabbos, that is higher thanParadise?  Our rabbis teach:  G-d would have taken Adam toJERUSALEM.  "JERUSALEM, basically, is even higher thanParadise.  Because Paradise, heaven, has a little opposite --hell."[[Or more precisely, 'sheol'?? --sa]] "But there has tobe something so holy...[that it] "has no opposite... --  andthis is basically JERUSALEM, which we haven't tasted yet. 
Because the Jerusalem we know now is the Jerusalem which isbelow Pradaise, but that JERUSALEM which is above Pdradisehasn't been revealed to us yet, and we're just waiting forit." (p5)...
    "Paradise is the one place we [know] from before, becausewe were there before...Every person in their soul wanderingshas been in Paradise before [coming to [[incarnating into]]earth], and all we have to do is try to go back.  But thenthere has to be something new which I've never experiencedbefore; this is the JERUSALEM which is above Paradise...Sothis is the 'New JERUSALEM', and I think the world is gettingmore and more ready for this new JERUSALEM." (p5).

6.  ON ECLECTICISM:
"I don't want to make a gefillte fish out of all religions."

 ..."If I see somebody else has a very beautiful nose, itdoesn't mean I have to go there and take off his nose and putit on my face...basically every religion is a revelation fromG-d, and all I can ask you is let me know a little bit whatG-d is revealing to you, but I have to do what G-d isrevealing to me, because if I cut myself off from my ownrevelation, then again I'm not living up to G-d."
                                     
7.  ON POLITICAL LEADERSHIP
"The saddest thing in the world is that the world is stillled by people who really shouldn't be their leaders today,because they are not really connected to the time of today. They are still here [on earth] for [only the purpose offinising up] unfinished ["karmic"] business [from previousincarantions]."
.p

8.  ON RABBINIC RESISTANCE TO NEW FORMS OF INTERPRETATION
"Collectively, all the great rabbis are still holding out...Idon't mean...changing any word of the Torah, because everyworld that G-d told is is so holy...What we are looking foris not less, we're looking for something much deeper thanever before." (p7)

9. R. TZADOK HACOHEN  
The world calls a person religious who goes through themotions of religion without meaning it.
Reb Tzadok HaCohen, one of the greatest scholars andkabbalists, lived 150 years ago.  He had only 50 followers,because to understand his teachings you had to know everyword of the kabbalistic teachings by heart.  He said that 
[[it seems that??]] the world is getting less and lessreligious, but the souls of people are getting more and morerefined.  He also said taht there was a time when everyonewanted to be an intellectual, but that days were coming wheneveryone would want to be a prophet.  
.p

10.  PARABLE OF THE BURIED TREASURE IN YOUR OWN KITCHEN
"This is what's happening to our [Jewish] people today":

This is a classic story:
Once upon a time there was a poor man named Reb Yankele[Sch.:  'Yeckele'] who lived in Cracow, Czechloslovakia.  Onenight he had a dream, that there was a buried treasure, andthat this treasure was hidden under the bridge in Prague,Poland.  At first he paid no heed to the dream, but then hehad the same dream again, and then again for a third time. So he said to himself "I am so poor, I have nothing to lose. I might as well go to Prague and see if the dream is true." But because he was so poor, he had to walk all the way toPrague on foot.
    When he got to Prague, he went to the bridge, and starteddigging under the bridge.  But in those days the ThirtyYears' War was going on.  So an army officer saw him digging,and ran up and said, "Are you crazy?  There's a war going on? Why are you digging here?  Are you a spy or something?"
	The poor man answered, "I am not a spy."  The armyofficer said "If you don't tell me why you were digging here,and will have to arrest you."  So the poor man was so broken,he had nothing to lose, and he told the army officer abouthis dream that there was a buried treasure hidden under thebridge in Prague.  He thought, now the army officer will digup my treasure and keep it, but at least I won't be arrested. But instead the army officer just laughed and said "Now Iknow you are crazy.  Because I had I dream too, just likeyours.  I dreamt that there is a buried treasure hidden underthe kitchen floor of some poor Jew named Reb Yankele inCracow.  But I not so stupid and crazy to go all the way toCracow to look for it.  It's just a silly dream."
     Reb Yankele, who was a lot smarter than he looked, saidnothing, and so the army officer let him go.  So then RebYankele went right back home, and went right to his kitchen,and started digging in kitchen (though his wife yelled at himat first) and found the buried treasure, which was very verybeautiful, and they all lived happily ever after.
.p
11.  ON HIDDEN PAGANS  
The purpose of religion is to serve G-d, "to cleanse myselfmore and more and more, just really to be aware that there isone G-d.  It takes a lifetime.  Because we are living in apagan world...I can sit in a synogogue or church and pray dayand night and still be a pagan.  [To be a pagan doesn'tnecessarily] "mean that I take a piece of wood and I throwmyself down [in front of it]; I can worship G-d on a paganlevel."

12. ON CONVERTS FROM MT. SINAI, AND BIG & LITTLE GOLDEN CALFS
"According to our tradition all the Jews  and even those nwhowill be Jews later on between now and the end of the world,were on Mt. Sinai.  ...Some of them were born by Jewishparents and some just born anywhere else and are making itback on their own because they really heard G-d's voice onMt. Sinai...We Jews were on Mt. Sinai and then sadly enoughwe made a Golden Calf, and our whole Jewish history is tocleanse ourselves from that golden calf.  We still haven'tcleanses ourseleves completey yet...everybody has their onwlittle calfs hanging around.  But the non-Jews who came backto us, they were only there on Mt. Sinai [but] they didn'ttake part in the Golden Calf...[although] maybe they havetheir own golden calf at home, whatever it is.  So wehn theycome they must bring with them this revelation of Mt. Sinaiwhich they remember...[they are] really bringing new life toour religion in a very deep way...In Kabbalistic terms [wemay ask] why {it is}...that King David's grandmother had tobe Ruth, who comes from a pagan faimily and is a convert?   
[Our superficial reaction is to imagine that] "it would bemore beautiful if King David [was Jewish on both sides]. So[the answer] obviously [is that] the [non-Jewish] nations ofthe world [also] have something very holy and deep, which wedon't have yet, and for the Messiah to be complete there hasto be this holiness brought in from the outside, even fromthe pagan world...I feel it very strongly:  before the end ofdays, something...is happening to our religion -- so manypeople from other nations are coming and joining us [that] itwill just make our relgion so complete, in a very deep way.
[pp10-1ll].

ON WRITTEN AND ORAL TORAH:
"In the Midrash it says [that] when G-d spoke to us on Mt.Sinai" all the gates of Heaven were opened and "we literallysaw from one corner of the world to the other." But whenMoses came down from Mt. Sinai, he taught only the Revealedpart of the Torah to everyone who was there on Mt. Sinai; but "the inner teaching was ...only given over to Aaron, to thepriests [Cohenim], and to the seventy elders, and to thechosen few."  (p13)
.P

ON TOURIST KABBALISTS:
One time I gave a little class in Jewish mysticism in NewYork, and taught "from one of the deepest books which wehave, it's called Mei HaShiloach, it's the deepest fountainin Judaism."  But someone in the class couldn't believe itwas really kaballah, because I didn't draw little charts on ablackboard.  He was a tourist kabbalist.  It's like if I'm atourist in Paris, I walk around with a little map, and ifsomeone who lives there tries to give me directions, I say,"How can you give me directions?  Where's your map?". (p1415).

"The world is so hungry that they go to any fake in theworld, because they're so hungry."
 
